During the late 1980s, my future wife spent several years teaching English in northern China. Back then, many Chinese manufacturers felt that showing off Western-language brand labels indicated worldliness, and so this Chengdu passenger van got a “CD” grille ornament and some somewhat garbled lettering above. I found this photograph, which was shot during a trip to Sichuan Province, in her collection and had to share it.

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Living overseas I saw many attempts to spice up a product with English words. Popular English words include:
USA
California
Sport
West
Fun
Mustang
Surf
Freedom
College
Special

So, within a crowd, it isn’t uncommon to see a Western-styled, or US-styled foreign jacket, shirt or sweatshirt with these English words printed on them. I loved seeing them because they usually made little sense. I own a “Special California Mustang” athletic jacket.

The English language signifies a coolness that is very attractive to most world cultures, especially among young people. America is still a very desirable place to dream about for billions of people. We are envied.

My favorite is the pinstripe packages available on various Euro hatches named after random US cities. I know there was the Boston edition Golf, the Atlanta package Opel Corsa, as well as ones like Memphis, St Louis, and many other not-so-lustworthy locales. It never made sense to me.

Of course, the most fun is when they garble English. There are lots of funny examples on the Japanese Engrish website (google it). My all time favorite car related one was a Nissan advert showing an SUV with the caption, “Forever and always, we can meet our best friend, Nature! Take a grip of steering. Nissan.”

You are right. This reminds me when few trips back to China in 2010 I saw shop selling tee-shirts with misspelled California, it was written “Califonia”. When I ask my translator why they selling this misspelled merchandise, he told me, no one cares, as long as it looks American, people will buy.

Agreed, perhaps the logos all fell out due to weak glue, and the owners are having trouble putting all of them back in the correct order, or orientation. Though it would be hard to get the N to show up like that, unless it’s mounted bottom (glue) side up.

A blender we owned (maybe we still have it), almost certainly made in China, included the option to blend up a “SMOOTIE”. To this day, any thought of patronizing an establishment such as Jamba Juice is expressed in our household as “wanna go get a smootie?”

It is equally amusing when American companies do the same… As a Chinese speaker, I got a chuckle out of Dodge’s official Chinese webpage. While not entirely garbled, there are enough grammatical errors and awkwardly phrased sentences to make one question Chrysler’s marketing department (or the translators they hired):

http://www.dodge.cn/home/index.html

Not to be too harsh on Chrysler, I include for your reading pleasure Chery’s English website, which is equally awkward:

http://www.cheryinternational.com/company.php

The sad thing is that both of these are rather large manufacturers, who clearly could have afforded to hire professional writers for the subject languages.

that’s where the marketing “professionals” come in. you know, the ones who don’t feel comfortable dealing with “foreigners” so they hire one of their own ilk to ensure that the translation is done by non-native target language speaker.